and just vote to remove a post from my feed.

But do you realize that downvoting a post counts as a downvote, which lowers its score? In some cases that can reduce how widely it’s shown across Lemmy, since the ranking algorithm uses score (upvotes minus downvotes) to decide visibility and sorting.

Downvoting just because you don’t want to see something in your feed isn’t a great reason to downvote. If you do that a lot to posts from one specific community, the mod there might notice a pattern of downvotes coming from your account with zero comments or other interaction. It can look targeted serial downvoting.

Lemmy has quite a few people who go around mass-downvoting every post in certain communities simply because they hate the topic, a particular poster, or the whole place (trust me, I know this all to well!). They’re basically serial downvoters, and it’s a real thing on the platform.

You don’t come across as one of those guys, but that’s probably why you’re getting mistaken for one. It would be way better if there was just a simple “hide” button so you could remove stuff from your view without tanking the post’s score.

And honestly, if you don’t like any of the posts in a community anyway, getting banned from it shouldn’t bother you much. You can just block the community or the user and move on.